Knives
by Elizabeth Culmer
Summary: Beware, you who fight evil, lest you fall into darkness. Beware, you who invite the abyss into your heart. Ginny. Lucius. Harry. Guard your soul. Graphic torture, self-harm, etc. Consider yourself warned.


**Disclaimer: **This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

**Summary**: Beware, you who fight evil, lest you fall into darkness. Beware, you who invite the abyss into your heart. Ginny. Lucius. Harry. Guard your soul. (Graphic torture.)

**Author's Note**: This is a story from the dark places in the back of my mind, the places that breed nightmares. If it disturbs you, that's good. It's meant to be disturbing. If you think Ginny and Harry could never sink this far, that's okay. You have a more optimistic view of human nature than I do. I hope you can keep that conviction.

Thanks to Vicky, my sister, for telling me why the rough draft felt unbalanced. Thanks also to Lasair, Miss Cora, and Quetzle for cleaning up the second draft: any remaining canon goofs, grammar mistakes, continuity errors, implausible characterizations, bad dialogue, confusing bits, boring passages, and Americanisms are my fault, not theirs.

Also, please note that this story was written before HBP came out. I've revised it to take the new canon into account, but I make no guarantees for how successful I was.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o  
**Knives**  
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

_Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein._

_---Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft._

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

This is how it starts:

He's knocked unconscious during the final battle -- stunned or otherwise taken out of the action -- and when you see Harry kill Voldemort, see that blaze of emerald light, you're standing right over his body. His white-gold hair spreads in a tangle under your feet, and you look down and realize you like that picture. You like the bloody spittle dribbling from his slack mouth. You want to see that again.

You want to be the one who makes him bleed.

Even with Voldemort dead, a battle is no place to deal with revelations like that, no place to question yourself. So you bend down, grab his shoulder, and Apparate.

He owes you, after all. He slipped a thin, shabby, black book into your school supplies six years ago with no care for the anguish it would cause. He chose you because he wanted to shame your father and discredit your house. Not because he hated _you_. He destroyed your life and he didn't even know your name.

In a way, he's lucky. At least your attention will be personal.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Only a Parselmouth can enter the Chamber of Secrets; if anyone else tries to open the doors, the Chamber will cave in on itself and pull Hogwarts down with it. If anyone else tries to seal the entrance, to keep Slytherin's heirs from their heritage, ancient spells will unravel the hostile magic. You know this because Tom told you during the long months he spent whispering in the back of your mind, daring you to open his diary again.

You're not a Parselmouth, but your lips and tongue remember the feel of liquid hissing and that's close enough to soothe the spells and let you pass.

You tip him down the pipe to the underground corridor and let his robes wipe the worst of the filth away before you follow. They're black. And they're already stained with blood and soot and guilt. A bit more won't matter.

Skeletons and snakeskin line the corridor, and you levitate him through the darkness to the Chamber door. It swings open at your hiss and torches snap to life as you cross the threshold; their reflections waver in dank puddles on the uneven stone floor. Slytherin's statue stands at the far end, battered from the dying convulsions of the Basilisk. Its stone eyes glare and its mouth gapes wide, revealing the serpent's nest.

The Basilisk itself lies to the side, decaying. Rats have long since returned to the Chamber and stripped the corpse of their old enemy bare. Only scales, bones, and poison-scorched ivory fangs remain. You sidestep the bones and drop him to the floor of the Basilisk's nest, out of reach of anything that might serve as a weapon.

First you strip off his robe. Then you pull off his white mask, and burn it. You snap his wand. You slip his vials of potions and poison into your pockets. You toss his daggers aside to lie among the bones. And you draw his sword from inside his cane and transfigure it into a long knife. The Malfoy crest remains on the hilt -- it resists any illusions or changes.

You slip it into the sheath of your old knife -- the knife you left in somebody's chest during the battle -- and wrap a scrap of his robe around the hilt to hide the crest. He owes you so much more than a lost knife, but this is a start.

Maybe if you stay until he wakes, you can figure out how to make him pay, but you don't have time for that. The battle must be over by now. Harry will wonder where you are. You can work out what to do with _him_ later.

You bind his wrists with magical chains, sink the ends into a wall, and leave him sprawled in the Basilisk's empty nest. There's a trickle of water down the wall if he's thirsty and a narrow drain in the floor if he needs to piss or vomit. He'll survive until you have time to think.

You struggle back up the pipe to Myrtle's bathroom, slide out the window, climb down the ivy-covered wall, and stroll up to the castle gates as if you've just now found your way out of the Forbidden Forest after the battle.

Nobody asks where you've been. In all the chaos, nobody even noticed you were gone. The Great Hall is a giant hospital, with what seems like half of St. Mungo's staff working to save the students who held off Voldemort's army long enough for the Order to strike. Hermione looks up from the triage center, her hands stuck halfway into Ron's bloody chest, and bursts into tears when she sees you. Luna and Neville stand guard over captured Death Eaters. Clumps of students huddle near the walls, each House drawing inward for support, and watch the Aurors carry in body after body.

'Ginny!' Harry strides over to where you stand by the doors and tilts his head in question. His shirt is torn at the shoulder -- blood seeps through the hasty bandage -- and his scar is vivid scarlet against his pale skin.

'I'm all right -- just a few bruises,' you say, and you wish you hadn't lost sight of him during the battle. You should have taken that wound for him. 'Orders?'

He relaxes; the slight shift of his posture is invisible unless someone knows exactly what to look for. You know. 'Round up some students and search the castle,' Harry says, and strides off to confer with a cluster of Aurors.

You grab a few of the old DA members, snag the surviving prefects, and call over some fellow sixth-years whose cool heads you can rely on. You split them into groups, assign areas, hand around extra Portkeys for emergencies, and head out to search Hogwarts for the dead, the wounded, and any surviving Death Eaters. This is your job, after all. You're a soldier. You're Harry's partner, his battlefield lieutenant, his trusted second... and the war isn't quite over yet.

The knife is a heavy weight at your side.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

You spend that night and the next day trying not to think about the man -- the prisoner -- down in the Chamber. You should turn him in or leave him down there to die. You shouldn't _need_ to think about what to do with him. But the next evening, after Aurors and Ministry officials finish taking your report on the battle and the aftermath, you slip out of Gryffindor Tower and ask the kitchen elves for some bread. They promise you their silence and blush when you thank them.

You skid down the pipes and think to yourself that if this keeps up, you really need to cut footholds into here sometime soon, because it's ridiculously hard to get out again once you reach the bottom.

He's awake when you open the Chamber doors, but he pretends he's asleep. You know what fake sleep looks like. You've seen your brothers try that trick often enough. So you kick him in the side and set the bread just out of his reach.

'Lucius Malfoy,' you say.

He sits up, one hand pressed to his side, and stares at you through hooded eyes. 'Ginevra Weasley, Potter's faithful bitch,' he answers. 'To what do I owe the... pleasure?'

And even though you expected something like this, even though you knew he'd be the same arrogant bastard as ever, even though you had a hundred responses prepared for anything he might say, you're speechless. Because this is real.

This is what you _don't_ say:

You don't say, 'Because you owe me for Tom.' You don't say, 'Because you helped kill my father.' You don't say, 'Because I hate you.' You don't say, 'Because you hurt Harry.' You don't say, 'Because I want to make _sure_ you're punished.'

Instead, you pull the knife from your belt and show it to him, let him see his family crest on the hilt -- the serpent wound around a cross -- and realize that it's his own sword.

He raises a golden eyebrow, somehow managing an elegant sneer despite being bloody and filthy and shackled to a wall. 'My sword? How is that an ans-- Ah. You don't have the slightest idea what you're doing, or why, do you?'

And he's right, but you'd never admit that to him, never admit that you're not sure why you gave in to the impulse to take him. So you say, 'I know exactly what I'm doing,' and hope that you can make that true.

He shakes his head. 'All you know how to do is stand behind Potter and close your eyes like a good little girl. At least he knows how to deal with enemies -- go fetch your master and let him decide what to do with me.'

But that's exactly what you can't do. You've kept him too long to explain away as an accident. You came down with food instead of Aurors, so he knows you were planning to keep him captive. He's seen the Basilisk's remains, so he knows you can enter the Chamber, knows you've been contaminated by Dark magic. You're the second-in-command of the DA and you can't afford a scandal, not now with so many Death Eaters still at large and so many Dark creatures loose in Britain. You can't turn him in, you can't let him go, and you don't want to kill him. Not yet.

You slide the knife back into its sheath. 'I don't belong to Harry. But from now on, you belong to me.'

He throws back his head and laughs.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

The first time you cut him, it goes badly. You've never tried inflicting pain before, never tried cutting anything that wasn't already dead. It's hard to judge the right speed and pressure to use. Too fast and you might miss or cut too deep. Too slow and the knife wavers, skin and blood clot the edge, and you have to run your thumb and forefinger along the blade to clean it.

After the first cut, you touch the bloody knife and stare at the red stain on your fingers. This is his blood. This is his blood, and you made him bleed. You trace your fingers through the blood that wells from his back, run your nail along the edge of the cut, and wonder at the sudden lightness in your heart when he flinches.

So you cut him again.

You kneel behind him on the pooled fabric of his robe. He sits cross-legged with his palms braced flat on the stone walls, caught between chains too short for him to turn and strike you. But he doesn't scream as you slice across his naked back. He doesn't flinch anymore when you follow the blade with your hand and press against muscle and bone to hold the skin taut. His breath hisses between clenched teeth; slight gasps and sighs are the only sign he feels any pain.

You don't feel light anymore.

This isn't like killing. There's a distance, both physical and emotional, when you take a life in battle; after a while it's easy to push the guilt and horror away and tell yourself it was necessary. It's easy to let other people call you a war hero and praise you for doing the right thing. It's easy to shut away the soldier, the killer, and fold yourself downward and inward until you're only a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl again.

Nobody is going to call torture the right thing to do, not when the war is over and you aren't even hunting for information. Nobody is going to say it's necessary. You can't push this away. You can't ignore the blood running down the knife onto your hands.

Something is twisting inside you, straining to its breaking point. This is torture. This is wrong. You know but you can't stop, and if _you_ hurt this much you want _him_ to scream, want the pain to break something in him too. But he just grinds his palms into the stones and waits until you've scored a dozen dripping red lines across his back.

'Is that all?' he asks when you lengthen his chains. 'Is that my great and terrible punishment?'

You stand and step back. Your hand is shaking and you rest it against the wall so he won't notice. You have a sickening feeling that he sees anyhow.

'This is practice,' you tell him.

He smirks. 'This is embarrassing. You don't have the stomach for torture. Give up. Turn me in. If you want revenge, other people can go about it better than this. The old dementors may be gone, but the Aurors can deal with me better than you ever could and Azkaban will sprout new horrors soon enough.'

You clench your fingers around the hilt of the knife.

'Oh, but that wouldn't be _personal_,' he continues, his voice cold and mocking. 'Poor little Ginny Weasley, who wants to be a big girl, who wants to play with the dark. You could never handle me. You'll break. I can wait.'

He sighs and adjusts his chains until he can lie on his side, curled elegantly on the pooled heap of his black, black robes. His hair, still light and fine despite grease and tangles, spills in a river of gold, and the red on his pale skin completes the picture.

The carvings on the hilt are biting into your hand, and it's _wrong_ that he should still be like this, that he should take you so lightly, that he should still be beautiful even unshaven, unwashed, and unredeemed. It's _wrong_, and it _hurts_, and _he has to hurt like you do_.

The twisted, stretched place inside you snaps. The pressure dissolves, and suddenly everything is clear.

You freeze him in place with a quick spell and you cut off his hair. The knife saws at the greasy strands -- back and forth, back and forth -- but it skids off, uselessly, until you pull the hair taut to the point of pain. You wind fistfuls of hair around your fingers and tighten your grip until a few strands snap and tear free from his scalp. Then you hack it away in sections, leaving each a different length. In some places you nearly shave him bald. Other handfuls of white-gold strands hang nearly four inches long.

You step back and survey your work. He isn't pretty anymore, not like that, not with his scalp oozing where the knife slipped and scraped him raw, sliced loose flaps of skin, and scored red lines down to the bone. You transfigure one block of stone into a mirror, cast a lantern spell onto the ceiling, and turn him, chains pulled taut across his chest and side, so his frozen eyes can contemplate his new appearance.

And you whisper into his ear, 'Draco renounced the Malfoy name. He burned the family manor. He says he has no father.'

He can't move, can't even twitch an eyelid, but his breath catches and stops. You listen to the silence, and you smile.

This is the first lesson: To break a person, you find what makes him who he is. And then, piece by piece, you take that away.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

He and Harry both remind you of Snow White -- skin as white as snow, flaming scar and dripping wounds, Harry's ebony hair and _his_ pitch-black heart. You don't ever tell this to _him_, but during the long first summer after the war, while everyone in the Order stays to rebuild Hogwarts for the coming school year, you come back late to Gryffindor Tower one evening and find Harry sitting alone with a bottle of Firewhiskey and brooding. _He's_ been prodding at raw wounds lately, trying to break you before you break him, so you sit down beside Harry and steal his glass. It's a familiar ritual from the war -- take a sip, set the glass down, and wait for Harry to drink in turn.

After a while, you get tipsy enough to call Harry a fairy-tale princess.

He blinks. 'What?'

You laugh. 'Snow White,' you say. 'White, black, red. That's you.' You lean closer, lose your balance on the sofa, and fall onto his shoulder. Your hand traces along his cheek. 'White.' His hair. 'Black.' His scar. 'Red. Supposed to be lips, but we're not together, not anymore. Shouldn't kiss you.'

'I wouldn't mind,' he whispers, and it's your turn to blink.

'Oh. Really?'

'Yeah.'

His eyes are shadowed, but you can see fire kindling behind the green, see the spark of life you relied on in battle. So you kiss him, like you're suffocating and he can breathe that life into you, like you're frozen inside and he's the summer sun. The knife swings against your hip and you wonder what _he_ would say if he could see you now. 'Potter's bitch,' he calls you, 'Potter's whore,' but this is the first time you've been so close to Harry in more than a year. This is the first time you've dared to cross the boundaries, the first time Harry's dropped his walls, the first time you feel like the war might really be over.

_He_ can bloody well shut up, you decide. This is your life, not _his_, and if you want Harry, it's your business.

Harry pulls you to your feet and your doubts fade like smoke as he kisses you again.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Autumn comes faster than you expect and Harry's gone from Hogwarts, off to London to join the Aurors at the rebuilt Ministry. Ron and Hermione tell him he doesn't need to keep fighting, that other people can track down the last Death Eaters and all the scattered remnants of Voldemort's Dark creatures. You tell them to leave him alone. He still has fire in his eyes, that smoldering emerald light that drove him into battles, and he wouldn't be happy without something to fight. You'd tell Harry that you understand, but he's been avoiding you since that night. He looks guilty every time you catch his eyes and he leaves like a thief in the night.

_He's_ still down in the Chamber, but you have lessons now, and friends to wonder at your absences, and you can't visit him more than once a week. One day you forget the protections on the Chamber and ask Winky to take him food and water. The dungeons don't cave in; it turns out Slytherin didn't bother to ward against house elf magic. So you tell Winky to feed him regularly. She agrees, in return for a promise to let her serve you once you leave in the spring. She's desperate for a master and experienced in caring for prisoners, and when you accept her service she immediately swears herself to silence. Winky understands secrets.

You've spent five years at Hogwarts without any secrets -- five years living in the open as penance for Tom -- and now you're back to hiding half your life from your roommates and all the other seventh-year students. They notice something's changed, but most of them ascribe that to the Order and the war. Anybody would have problems after leading people in battle, they think. Anybody would have trouble coming to terms with herself after becoming a soldier.

Except you're not a soldier, not anymore. And you aren't a warrior either, not like Harry. You're a torturer. Your hands are stained with blood and your heart is dyed black with hatred. You're everything Dumbledore warned the Order against, everything you prayed Harry wouldn't have to become.

You pretend it's justice, not revenge or a sick fascination with pain. You tell yourself you're doing this for Harry, tell yourself that the blood running down _his_ body is payment for all the fear and pain left in his wake, but you know you're lying to yourself. You know it, and he knows it, and he never fails to remind you of your hypocrisy.

'How the virtuous have fallen,' he says when you steal down to the Chamber during Christmas holidays. He's propped against the wall with his tattered cloak drawn around him like a shield, and shattered glass at his feet where he hurls vials at Winky after she forces Blood-Replenishing Potion down his throat. 'I'm beginning to think we should have tried recruiting you. You would have been quite at home during some of the Dark Lord's interrogations or his games.'

'No,' you insist. 'I'm not like you.'

He winces as you draw the knife along his bearded cheek; a narrow line of blood wells up through the gap in his skin and trickles through the tangled golden hair. 'I was under the impression that the righteous didn't lie. Then again, you did shelter and conceal the Dark Lord's soul for nearly a year, so I suppose--'

You're not listening anymore.

He's accusing you of helping Tom. _He's_ accusing _you_ of opening the Chamber, of Petrifying Hermione, and Colin Creevey (who died screaming and you couldn't save him), and Penelope Clearwater (who spends her days locked in the closed ward at St. Mungo's), and Nearly-Headless Nick (who faded with the other ghosts, holding the castle wards during the final battle), and Justin Finch-Fletchley (who betrayed the Order and died at the end of Harry's wand while you kept the other soldiers from interfering).

You are not like Tom. You are not like Voldemort. You are not like _him_. You can't be. You refuse to be.

And yet...

The knife is heavy in your hand. Blood coats your fingers, thick and tacky as it dries. Guilt and shame stab into your stomach, and he's breaking you. You have all the power, but he's winning. And you can't let him go.

You freeze him with a spell, while his mouth is open and dark. You haven't asked him any questions; you aren't looking for answers. He won't have to stand trial.

He doesn't really need his tongue.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

You pass your NEWTs with flying colors, particularly Potions, Herbology, and Care of Magical Creatures. You don't do quite as well in Defense Against the Dark Arts, but you spent the past three years learning to cast more hexes and curses than you learned to block, and learning ways to dodge and fight hand-to-hand or blade-to-blade, none of which are on the official curriculum, so you're not terribly surprised at your score.

As you climb down your handmade ladder to the Chamber, you can't help thinking that you might have done better in a test of Dark Arts curses rather than Light Arts defenses.

And you start to wonder. You've never tried to curse him. You've spelled him into chains, spelled him frozen, and sometimes spelled him silent, but you've never actually hexed him. All you've used is his own knife.

He cast Cruciatus on Harry once, and on Ron, and Luna, and even his own son. He nearly hit you with a Reductor hex during one battle, and came very close to boiling your blood inside your veins when he caught you and Harry searching one of Voldemort's minor outposts for Hufflepuff's cup -- Harry barely cast the counter curse in time to save your life.

Harry says that you can only cast Cruciatus if you truly want a person to suffer -- you need hatred, thick, black, soul-destroying hatred. Or you need to enjoy pain. That's why Harry's never been able to use that curse; whatever his faults, he has too much compassion and restraint to truly wish pain on another person. He can wish death -- you've seen him cast _Avada Kedavra_, seen that unearthly green light, light that exactly matches his eyes, lash out from his wand and burrow into doomed enemies -- but Harry isn't a sadist.

_Harry_ isn't.

You wonder if _you_ could use Cruciatus, and the question writhes queasily in your stomach. A year ago you couldn't. But now secrets and knives are twisting you more than the war ever did. A person who can slice out another person's tongue isn't someone who shrinks from causing pain.

Last year you panicked after your first kill -- it was self-defense, you or him, but in the end you were still alive and the Death Eater, a gangly man with pimples and a picture of his fiancée in his pocket, was dead. You spent a day in hospital recovering from an hours-long fit of dry heaves. This year, even though your stomach curdled when you held the severed tongue in your hand and threw it down the drain, you sat down to dinner twenty minutes later and nobody knew you'd ever been upset. Even six months ago you couldn't eat after battles. Harry always worried about that, always tried to make you relax. You wonder what he'd say about your new composure.

_He's_ curled up on his tattered robes, fast asleep, and you tiptoe over to the Basilisk's nest as quietly as you can. The knife rests against your side, tempting, but you draw your wand instead and try to cast away your doubt and shame.

Vengeance against evil isn't evil itself. _Neville_ used Cruciatus against Bellatrix Lestrange, and nobody accused him of being evil. You can do this. It doesn't say anything about you if you can use this curse.

He _deserves_ this. He gave you Tom's diary. He knew who was in it and how it worked, and he gave you the diary anyhow. When he escaped Azkaban, he and two others trapped your father and toyed with him for two hours before they finally killed him and Portkeyed his body into the Great Hall during supper. He horrified his son, who's never shrunk from darkness, into renouncing one of the oldest and richest families in wizarding Britain. He planned the attack on Diagon Alley. He tortured Harry. He's killed, and killed, and killed.

You draw up all those years of hatred and helpless rage, and funnel vengeance through your wand. '_Crucio!_'

Scarlet light burrows into his flesh. He writhes like a man on the rack, like a man burned alive. Tears stream from his eyes and spittle flies from his mouth. He screams like fire is burning in his stomach, like a beast is clawing out his heart, like acid is eating through his bones. He screams, and screams, and screams, and screams.

There's no blood. There's no touch. Your hands are clean. Everything seems remote, like a dream or a story in which the heroine suffers a brief lapse into vengeance before she recovers herself and returns to the light.

In a whole year, you've never made him react this much with the knife.

This is the second lesson: Anybody can be broken -- truly, completely, utterly. The question is whether it's worth the price.

You cut off the spell and run from the room.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

St. Mungo's offers you a job as an apprentice herbalist and potions mistress, preparing healing draughts and poultices for the mediwizards and mediwitches. The irony is thick enough to cut. You fight down the mad urge to tell them you've spent a year learning to cause pain and don't deserve the chance to save people, and you accept. It pays well, and you've always had a gift for hands-on work.

Mum offers to fix up the twins' old room in an effort to keep at least one of her children at home, but you couldn't keep _him_ at the Burrow. You tell her you're planning to stay in Hogsmeade, that you've found a house you can afford to buy -- being a hero of the war paid surprisingly well, and you haven't wasted your money.

The house is on the outskirts of town, toward the Forbidden Forest, which is probably why it's going for a song despite its size. You're not afraid of the Forest, and you want your privacy.

You smuggle him out of the Chamber by transfiguring him into a ferret: a small piece of poetic irony. It doesn't last long -- a wizard's own magic always fights an involuntary transformation -- but he's small enough for Winky to carry along with the rest of your belongings when she sets up the house on your last day at Hogwarts.

Your friends don't know you've bought a house -- it's unnerving how easy it is to start keeping secrets again -- so you pretend you want a few hours alone to write to Hermione and Ron, and you slip out of the castle. You find Winky at her wits' end, chasing a frantic ferret around the kitchen, and you can't help laughing at how helpless he is; Winky's sealed the doors and windows so he can't escape, and he's too small to hurt even a house elf.

You snatch him as he hurtles past, and you take him down into the cellar. You hold him against your side as you transfigure the dirt walls into stone and attach his old manacles to the water pipes behind the stairs. He shivers under your fingers, and when you change him to human form, he collapses in a limp huddle on the floor. When you shackle his wrists, he curls into the chains. When you draw a bloody furrow down his back, he doesn't react.

You reach down and grasp his chin; he doesn't resist as you turn his face toward you. His eyes are blank, hollow, and that's _wrong_.

You rest the tip of the knife by the inner corner of his eye, and slice down along the side of his nose. Blood runs down like tears, and when he blinks, he comes back to life. The impotent hatred that twists his face is an absolution.

You smile. 'Welcome to your new home,' you say, and you walk up the stairs and shut the door behind you.

The first piece of furniture you move is a bookcase; you drag it in front of the cellar door. Winky scolds you for scratching the hardwood floors and asks why you didn't float it into place, but there are some things that need to be done by hand. This was one of those things. Now the cellar is your secret place. Winky can pop downstairs using the noisy house elf transport spells and you can Apparate, but nobody else can enter without already knowing the cellar exists.

Your family arrives the next evening for a surprise housewarming party, dragging most of the Order and a gaggle of your school friends along. You panic at the door, the knife a burning weight at your side, before you remember that you blocked the cellar, cut out his tongue, cut off his hair, and carved lines on his face. Nobody will stumble across him, and even if someone does, he won't be recognized.

You send Winky down to cast a muffling spell anyhow.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

During your third month at St. Mungo's, several Aurors under Harry's command are admitted after a nasty skirmish with one of the hardline Separatist factions. Dozens of families, villages, and shires tried to secede during the war, when nobody trusted the Ministry, and even now, after Voldemort's death, wizarding Britain is still a hopeless muddle. Nobody really agrees on laws and chains of command, and the Aurors are hard-pressed to keep a lid on the chaos. If Harry hadn't decided to throw in with the Ministry, things would probably be even worse; he carries a lot more moral authority than he thinks he does.

You know Harry's in the building -- rumor spreads quickly when he's involved. You hear about it when Hermione takes charge of the hexed and bleeding Aurors, and you know she won't let Harry sit around and feel guilty. So when Harry wanders down to the cool cellars where the herbs and potions are stored, when he pokes his head into your workroom as you chop salamander hearts, you're less surprised than you might be. His robes are stained and torn and he hasn't done a particularly good job of washing his face, but his shadowed eyes snare you the same way they always do.

'Erm. Hi, Ginny,' he says as he hovers in the doorway. 'Sorry I haven't owled you in a while. Er, how are you?'

You want to be angry with him -- he let you back in and then ignored you for over a year -- but Harry has enough guilt gnawing at his heart already, and you don't have much moral high ground these days. So you shrug and say, 'All right, more or less. I like my job, and it's peaceful living alone.' You'd be happier if _he_ hadn't started refusing food; you're not certain if he's actively trying to commit suicide or if he simply doesn't care about his life anymore. He's not _allowed_ to kill himself. Only you have the right to decide when he dies.

'You have a good house for that,' Harry says. 'I wouldn't want to live alone at Grimmauld Place -- too many memories to tiptoe around. Remus probably isn't the best person to help me stay cheerful, though, not even with Tonks around all the time.'

He grins ruefully, and you find yourself smiling along with him. You sprinkle the diced hearts into your cauldron and tap your wand to lower the flames.

'You could always divide the place into flats,' you say. 'That would get more people around.'

As you wash blood from your hands, Harry considers this. 'I think I could get seven flats out of the house, eight if I had the cellar finished and converted. And I could charge rent... or Remus could, actually. He could be the building superintendent -- which would be good, since he still can't hold down a job.'

'Seven flats.' You snicker as you drag a wooden spoon through your nearly gelatinous potion.

'What?'

'Snow White,' you say, remembering that hot, whiskey-soaked night. 'Seven flats for your seven dwarves.'

'Ginny, I'm not a fairy-tale,' Harry says, but he grins a little as he says it.

'And I'm not drunk this time,' you say. You raise the spoon and scrape off the potion residue with a flint knife, letting the scarlet drops fall back into the cauldron. A year ago, you told _him_ to go to hell for one night and grabbed at something bright and _alive_. Maybe you can touch that fire again. '...If I ask you out for dinner, you can't keep pretending you took advantage of me. And you can't still think I'd be in danger.'

Harry gapes at you for several seconds. 'Are you inviting me?'

You meet Harry's eyes, stare into poison green, green the exact color of death, and feel the knife and thoughts of _him_ fade into the background like half-remembered childhood stories. 'Yeah. And home for the night, if you want.'

When he takes you to Grimmauld Place instead of Hogsmeade, you're obscurely disappointed until you realize that you were starting to plan ways to nudge the bookcase aside and expose the cellar door. That's unacceptable. So you excuse yourself to freshen up and grip the knife as you stare into the mirror over the sink.

Harry is special. Harry was your partner, your commander. You've killed for him and he's killed for you, and he saved you from the diary that _he_ gave to you. But Lucius Malfoy is your secret, not Harry's.

You prick your thumb as a reminder, and then join Harry in bed.

The scratches you leave down his back feel like cheating.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Autumn arrives and you find yourself agreeing to host a Halloween party for your friends -- not the DA and the Order, but the people you shared rooms and lessons with for seven years. You're the only one who has an actual house instead of a flat and they tell you the Forest looming beyond your garden walls adds atmosphere.

You remember to feed _him_ around noon, and you cast silencing spells over him, over the cellar, and over the blocked-up door. Then you ask Winky to clean and put up decorations while you cook; she doesn't like being reminded that she can't do everything, but after years of managing Crouch Jr. with only the vaguest instructions to set her role, she almost sparkles every time you give her an order. She radiates a suppressed cheer as she collects pumpkins from your garden and carves them into jack-o-lanterns.

You start cutting chicken for a stir-fry, and you're halfway through the third breast before you notice that this is going a lot faster than it used to. The butcher's knife slices evenly through muscle and tendon, carving neat and tidy strips instead of the straggly, misshapen pieces you used to produce under Mum's guidance. The balance on this knife is different from _your_ knife, but it feels comfortable in your hand.

You stare at the chicken for several minutes, wondering why it doesn't bleed.

Your friends trickle in around dusk, and you shake off your unease long enough to welcome them in, arrange the salads and starches they've brought, and pour wine and beer. They hold up the conversation on their own; all you have to do is nod and laugh at their jokes and admit that yes, you _have_ been seeing Harry a bit more these days. Somebody wanders over and pokes through the esoteric potions guides and herbology journals in your bookcase and you manage to sound perfectly normal as you lean against the wood and point out the new anesthetic brew St. Mungo's is testing this year, as well as the gardening tips that helped you grow your pumpkins.

Everything feels distant and unreal, like a dream.

When everyone leaves, Apparating or Flooing out in ones and twos, you draw the knife from your side and slowly, hesitantly, slice a line along the underside of your forearm, where you can claim you just scratched yourself on brambles in the garden. It feels like cutting chicken. It feels like cutting _him_. But this time, you can feel the blood and pain, and the stinging tear of parting flesh. You're alive. You're awake. You're _here_.

You run your fingers through the blood and lift them to your lips; the sweet, metallic scent drifts faintly to your nose. Your tongue darts out, once... and then you jerk your hand away and rush to the kitchen sink. You pour rubbing alcohol on the cut and flinch at the stinging pain. You bandage your arm. Then you wash your hands for nearly ten minutes, until they're swollen, wrinkled, and rough.

You leave the knife in the kitchen, next to the butcher's knife, but you don't even last an hour before creeping downstairs to reclaim it.

The serpent and the cross press into your hand as you slip the knife under your pillow.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Ron and Hermione announce their engagement at Christmas, and naturally you and Harry wind up as best man and maid of honor. 'It's just as well,' Harry tells you, 'since I'd have asked you to come with me anyway.'

'So we're official again?' you ask him as you sit at a Diagon Alley café, planning the stag and hen parties. (Ron wants strippers. Hermione insists she wants a quiet party, nothing embarrassing, but you and Harry know better.)

'Yeah,' he says. 'We sort of... we fit, I suppose. And I know I can trust you -- you see _me_, not Famous Harry Potter or a ridiculous hero.'

You shrug. 'We _were_ partners, even after you decided love was too dangerous. I've seen your worst. You've seen mine. And I like spending time with you even when it's not life or death.'

This is a lie, of course. Harry hasn't seen anything close to your worst, not anymore.

His eyes darken, shadows veiling that poison green, and he frowns. 'No, you haven't. You were in hosp--' He breaks off and begins again, awkwardly. 'Do you know why we were partners, why I stood up for you when Ron and Hermione wanted to keep you at Hogwarts?'

You shake your head; you've always assumed it was because he didn't want to stand between Ron and Hermione and needed someone else to watch his back, or because he hadn't learned how to say no to you at that point and didn't want to look like an idiot by backing down in front of his friends, but that's nothing to be ashamed of, nothing he would be telling you now.

'I needed someone I could trust, but I couldn't stand having either of them with me. I cared too much -- if they died, I wanted it to be someone else's fault. I needed someone I'd be willing to sacrifice. That was you. I... er, I liked you, but we _hadn't_ had years; I didn't know you enough to miss you the same way.' He looks down and hunches his shoulders, as if he expects you to yell or hit him.

And that's such a silly thing to worry about, such an insignificant secret compared to yours, that you laugh. Of course you were expendable. You agreed to be Harry's partner _because_ you were willing to die for him, and because you didn't trust anyone besides Hermione and Ron to do that properly. 'You're an idiot,' you tell Harry. 'I always knew I was expendable -- that was the point. But that was then. I hope you'd miss me _now_.'

'Of course I would!' He straightens and scowls at you, before he catches your grin and laughs at himself.

It's easy to slip into teasing him, into the bright sunlight of the afternoon, into the person you might have been without the war and without _him_. Harry can wake you from the darkness, drag you out of your nightmares, and you love him for that. He has the coloring, but maybe you're the real Snow White, trapped in your coffin until your prince restores you to life.

But even Harry can't keep you away from home forever, and _he's_ waiting in the cellar, a haunted figure with hollow eyes that you don't know how to fill. Your knife hangs at your side, dripping poison into your soul.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

_He's_ still refusing food unless you sit beside him and force him to eat, and it occurs to you one evening that it's boring to watch him these days. It's boring to cut him -- he never provokes you anymore, never reminds you that you're alive.

The next day, you stop by Flourish and Blotts on your way home from work and buy an empty journal. You hand it to him, along with a quill and a bottle of ink. 'It's a few years late,' you say, and his eyes widen. He studies the journal -- blank white pages bound in black leather -- as if it might sprout fangs and attack.

You always enjoy moments when people understand you without needing explanations.

But you haven't hexed the journal. 'It's safe. I just thought you might want to insult me again.'

He smiles, for the first time in nearly a year, and waves you away. The gesture is so familiar from the early days that you blink and study him, wondering if you're only imagining his long, silver-shot beard and tangled hair, only hallucinating his stained shirt and ragged trousers. But his hands are caked with bits of dried blood, and scars slash across his face and wreath around his fingers.

You Apparate to your bedroom, where Harry stayed two nights ago, and draw the knife from its sheath at your side. _His_ outside matches his inside, now. He has no secrets. But all your marks are hidden.

Slowly, carefully, you bite your lip and draw a horizontal line across your left forearm. And another. And another. And another, and another, and another, until you have a line for every person you killed face-to-face during the war, all fourteen of them. Then you add a fifteenth, for the ones you never saw and couldn't count. Air kisses the ragged skin, sweat laps at the blood, and your arm burns like poison.

The lines are a lie -- they're only the bare surface of your darkness -- but the blood wells up like an apology. You're alive, and they're not, and but you can hurt for them. You can still feel pain.

When you return to the cellar to read his flood of hatred, you're smiling.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

'Is there someone else?' Harry asks as you dance in the Burrow's garden at Ron and Hermione's wedding. His voice is light, relaxed, but his emerald eyes burn behind their veil of shadows, banked and smoldering with rage.

'_What?_' You flinch from his eyes; he's watching you like you're a spy.

His hand tightens on your waist as he whirls you through the crowd. 'You seem distracted, like you're drifting away when you're with me. And sometimes you have cuts I know don't come from slicing potions ingredients; you're not clumsy. Is there someone else?' He smiles then, a bare flash of teeth... which suddenly twists into a mask of happiness as he squeezes your fingers in the wartime code: _warning, watcher_.

You curve your lips until the photographer vanishes in the sea of guests, and then match Harry's glare. 'There is _no one_ else,' you hiss. 'I've only ever been with you. I _love_ you.'

You should be furious. You know that, but guilt and shock smother your anger... because there is someone else. _He_ has half your attention, half your life. Harry has the light but _he_ has the darkness. You don't love him -- you _don't_ -- but you don't want to give him up. He's the only one who sees all your secrets.

'You... love me?' Harry asks, gesturing toward himself with your joined hands. You nod. He blinks, and the shadows in his eyes thin to smoke as the blaze changes from anger to something else. 'Wow.'

The two of you spin through the wedding guests like smoke through trees, and you begin to relax into the familiarity of motion and the ridiculous smile on Harry's face. Then he frowns again. 'But if that's true, why do you act like you're turning away? Where do those cuts come from? Ginny, are you in trouble?'

Yes, more than he could ever guess. You're drowning in darkness, and it's your own fault.

Once, Harry wanted Bellatrix Lestrange to writhe in pain. He tried to cast Cruciatus on her. But even then, even bare moments after Sirius died, when his fury was brightest, he couldn't make the curse work. No matter how much you want to tell him, he can't possibly understand what your life has become.

You shake your head. 'No, no trouble. I just wish Ron and Hermione hadn't chosen this day for their wedding. I know it's supposed to be a happy day -- the anniversary of the war's end -- but they weren't on the front lines, not like we were.' You catch the twist in Harry's smile, the shadows that speak of self-loathing, and add, 'That's _not_ your fault. You weren't playing favorites to choose me instead of them. _I_ couldn't have researched Horcruxes and curses, or coordinated all the feints and raids. You were right to risk me.'

'Point,' he concedes, and swings you around in a twirl as the music changes to a tango. Your bodies meld against each other, and you lose yourself in the blatant affirmation of life and desire.

After Hermione and Ron drive off to their honeymoon in the re-domesticated Ford Anglia, Harry grabs your hand and Apparates to Grimmauld Place before you can start helping Mum clean up the house and garden.

'I know what you're doing, Ginny,' he says as he tips you onto his bed, his voice rough and urgent. 'I've _been_ there. You're pretending that everything is your fault. You think nobody can understand what you're going through. You remember the war and you think everything was easier then. Everything was simple, and if people were on the wrong side you could just get rid of them.'

He pulls off your shoes and your silk stockings. 'Do you remember when I thought I was being possessed? You said you'd been there. I never said thanks for that, but it helped.' He leans down to run his fingers along your neck, trailing them down to the top button of your leaf-green dress. 'Well, I was with you during the war, remember? I know what that's like. We got lost in the dark together.'

His fingers work down the row of tiny buttons. 'You remember how we got used to killing.' He slips the dress off your shoulders. 'You remember how it felt to be powerful.' He slides it down past your waist, and you arch off the bed to let him drag the fabric over your hips. 'You remember how easy it was to like the darkness.'

He leans down and touches your cheek. 'Skin as white as snow.' Your mouth. 'Lips as red as blood.' Your heart. 'But no black. No darkness, not anymore. We came _back_, Ginny. We came back.'

But you didn't come back. You've been spiraling into the abyss and you don't know how to find your way out. Everything about you is a mask. Everything Harry loves about you is a lie.

You shatter inside as he kisses you.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

You start telling _him_ about your life while you draw on his skin in blood. You tell him about your childhood, Hogwarts, your job, and the war. You tell him about your brothers, Hermione, Neville, Luna, and all your other friends. You tell him about potions, herbology, and the latest research published in the trade journals. You tell him about your garden and Hogsmeade, and the changing seasons that grace them.

He listens. Sometimes he asks questions. Sometimes he probes for wounds with pointed words; you find his deadly aim oddly comforting. Sometimes he writes a memory from his own life, from before. The dark ones wash past in a wave of ink, and are forgotten. The scattered moments of joy -- seeing his son for the first time, learning to fly, washing his wife's hair on long summer evenings, finding a cause and knowing with his whole self that his life had a purpose -- those lodge in your heart like shards of steel. But you read. You owe him that, at least.

You share your lives in blood and darkness, but you don't talk about Harry. Ever.

It's an act of balance. Harry doesn't know about Lucius, so _he_ can't know about Harry. They mean totally different things to you, hold opposite places in your life, but you can't let go of either. Without Harry, without that fire and motion, you'd be cold and lifeless, made of lead. Without _him_, without his net of words and the weight of blood... without him you might float away like a puff of dust in the wind.

'Did I ever tell you the story of the captured fly?' you ask one afternoon as you wash his hair; you've found that he's more likely to be responsive if you keep him moderately clean.

-No- he writes.

'Ah.' You rinse out the last of the watermelon-scented shampoo -- he hates watermelon -- and start to run a brush through the uneven white-gold strands. 'When I was ten, a fly got into my bedroom and, instead of swatting it, I trapped it under a glass on my windowsill. It was helpless. And then, because it was helpless, I couldn't kill it. But it was a fly, so I couldn't let it go either.

'In the end, I put a drop of honey and a drop of water on the windowsill and slid the glass along until the food and water were under it along with the fly. It lasted two days before it died -- starved, dehydrated, suffocated, or something. And I've felt guilty ever since, for not killing it cleanly when I had the chance.'

You lay down the brush and pick up the knife. His eyes, bright with contempt for your weakness, and with something else you can't quite name, dull with the familiar expectation of pain. You don't like him to have emotions you don't control; today you'll take your time. You haven't touched his left shoulder in weeks -- the last lines have healed into a faint tracery of white. You test the edge on your finger, nod, and slice the first line. Red wells up and trickles from the wound. He hisses as the knife slips free, but even now he never flinches.

'The funny thing,' you continue, conversationally, 'is that none of my brothers noticed I had a fly caught on the windowsill. They would've killed it right off -- not even Charlie was that sensitive about animals. And I wouldn't have minded if somebody else finished the fly. I just couldn't do it myself.'

-I take it I am your new fly?- he writes once you finish carving a star and pour rubbing alcohol onto the design. You like seeing his skin shiver when the liquid burns into his wounds. You like the coolness as it runs over your fingers, and the slick of blood and alcohol between his skin and yours.

'In a manner of speaking,' you say.

-And will you feel guilty when I die?-

You test the knife again on your arm and stare at the vivid red, a color as impossibly bright as Harry's eyes, only the exact opposite shade. Red is blood and fire and death; green is the color of growth and life. But red is also the anchor into the world, the color of birth, while green light and hatred usher you beyond the veil. Harry is green. _He_ is red. Light and dark, life and death, and you're starting to forget which is which.

'Will I feel guilty?' You slash a deeper line through the star on his shoulder, obliterating your design in a wash of scarlet. 'No more than I already do.'

-Then that will be enough.-

This is the third lesson: Sooner or later, the darkness will trap you. And you can't get out alone.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

This time, when Harry walks into your workroom, you're chopping mint and willow bark to make infusions -- the willow eases pain, and the mint cuts the boiled-grass flavor of the bark. The sweet-sharp scent of mint permeates the room, and he wrinkles his nose as he shuts the door. One hand stays tucked behind his back.

'What am I interrupting?' he asks.

'Nothing much,' you say, and slide the green leaves and water-logged strips of bark to the side of your cutting board. 'I always have time for you.'

He smiles, and the shadows in his eyes vanish for a moment in one pure blaze of light. 'Me too. Er, I have time for _you_, I mean, not for myself.'

'It would be funny not to have time for yourself,' you say as you walk around the table and saunter toward him, watching for the spark of desire in his eyes. 'How would that work? Would you split yourself in two and leave one of you behind?'

Harry laughs, and finally brings his arm into view; he's holding a bouquet of crimson roses wrapped in white tissue paper. 'If I could do that, I'd send one of me to work and the other could spend all day with you. Of course, the poor sod at work would go mad with jealousy.'

'Don't bet on it -- I'd put you to work stirring cauldrons quick enough.' You grab an empty, wide-mouthed bottle from a shelf, fill it with water, and start unwrapping the roses. 'I'm sure you'd be sick of me soon--'

Your hands keep moving for a few second after you run out of words, and you slide the ring off the stems and turn it in your fingers. It's a plain gold band, set with tiny stones: diamond, onyx, and ruby. White, black, red.

'Is this...?'

'Yeah,' Harry says. 'I had a speech to go with the ring, about true love and happily ever after, but...' He shrugs. 'It doesn't fit. But _we_ fit, you know? We see each other. And I won't ever get sick of you. I...' He shifts his feet awkwardly. 'Erm. I love you, Ginny, even when you call me an idiot, and when you... well. Er, marry me? Please?'

And you can't think of anything to say. Harry's half your life, but how can you marry him when the other half of you belongs to _him?_ How can you marry him when you're living a lie? How can you marry him when you're lost in the darkness? How can you marry him when you can't even clear the shadows from his eyes for more than one second at a time?

...And how could you ever tell him no, turn him away, cut out half your heart?

'Yes,' you say. 'Yes.'

You're crying when you say it. You're crying when he hugs you. You're crying when he kisses you. You're crying when you wrap your arms around him and push him against the door, when he hikes up your skirt, when you pull down his trousers.

'Happy tears,' you tell him as you straighten his shirt afterwards. 'Tears of release.'

Harry smiles, wistfully, and kisses the salty tracks on your cheek. 'You're lucky. I don't know how to let go like that anymore. There's a reason I'm always on field duty, and it isn't just that I'm good at it.'

You slide the ring onto your finger and touch the stones. White, black, red. The story of your life, laid out in colors.

He didn't think to add an emerald, but Harry's eyes are better than any stone.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

'Harry asked me to marry him today,' you say as you comb _his_ hair.

-And?- he writes. The word is large and scrawled, his shorthand for sarcasm.

'I said yes.'

He jerks around, shock written over every inch of his gaunt, scarred face. You smile. 'I never told you about Harry, did I? We've been seeing each other for over a year now.'

Slowly, he recovers his tattered mask of calm and picks up his journal. -What will become of me?- he writes, and then, -Does he know?-

Your hands still. This is the question you've been avoiding. This is the question for which you have no answer. You can't bring him to Grimmauld Place, and you can't expect Harry to move into your house without noticing the steady drain on your supplies and your habit of vanishing for an hour or two every day. You can't kill him outright -- it would be the simple solution, the easy solution, but every time you decide to end things, your hand freezes on the knife. You can't abandon him and let him die of thirst and hunger. He's your trapped fly and you've caught yourself along with him, just like when you were ten.

You could turn him over to the Aurors, but he could talk. You could Obliviate him first, but no memory charm is perfect. You could leave him at a Muggle hospital, but you know, deep inside, that sooner or later you'd find yourself taking a detour on your way home to collect him.

You could tell Harry. And he'll finally see you. And he'll leave. And the abyss will swallow you.

Unless...

_'We got lost in the dark together,'_ he said. _'But we came back, Ginny. We came back.'_

You can't get out alone. But no one is alone. You can never be certain someone will take your hand, but sometimes you have to trust.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

When Ron and Hermione get wind of your engagement, they talk Remus and Tonks into letting them throw a surprise party at Grimmauld Place. People flock to the house in brightly-colored hordes, eager to congratulate their heroes and bask in reflected glory; the roar that rises when you and Harry walk through the door is earthshaking. You flinch, and dig your nails into Harry's wrist when his hand twitches toward his wand. _Watcher_, you say with your fingers. _Patience_.

'For you, I'll play nice,' he whispers as he leans down to kiss your cheek. The crowd laughs and cheers, and Harry's eyes are filled with smoke and shadows when he turns to face the invaders in his home. You touch the knife at your side and stitch a false smile to your face as you accept the barbed congratulations of society witches.

When the crowd finally trickles out, long past midnight, the renewed silence is like water in the desert. Tonks and Remus vanished to their room an hour ago; there's no one to interrupt. You grab a bottle of Firewhiskey and drag Harry off to the library. He finds a shadowed corner with a black leather sofa and a flickering torch, and you conjure two glasses onto the gilded table, sweeping Remus's books to the side.

'To remember our first time,' you say as you pour. 'No talking, not yet. I'm sick of people talking.' Harry opens his mouth and you press your fingers against his lips. 'Later.'

Fire sparks behind his poison green eyes, and he picks up his glass.

After a while, you get tipsy enough to break the silence. 'Harry. What's the worst thing you've ever done?'

He blinks. 'What?' His voice is calm, but his eyes are wary, dark.

You shrug and lean sideways on the sofa, resting your head on his shoulder. 'You said once it was deciding I was expendable. But that's not enough to put shadows in your eyes all the time. I don't like seeing shadows.'

A minute passes before Harry says, 'And then you'll tell me why I find cuts all over your body. That's what you're leading up to, right?'

He knows you too well, even now. 'Yes.'

'It was when you were in hospital, after that blood-boiling hex,' Harry says flatly. 'Neville brought Bellatrix Lestrange in and somebody had to question her. There are ways around Legilimency, and she knew them. There are even ways around Veritaserum. But you have to be able to concentrate to use them.

'Remus turned her over to me and Moody, and Moody said that he'd ask the questions, since he knew about interrogations. She'd have to concentrate hard to keep him from learning anything. Then he looked at me and said, "It's hard to concentrate when you're in pain." I knew what he was asking. And I asked when I should start.'

You touch his wrist, gently, and he flinches. Then he flips his hand over, laces his fingers through yours, and continues. 'I can't use Cruciatus -- magic's very good at distinguishing between righteous anger and true hatred -- but it doesn't much matter _why_ you pick up a knife.'

Harry shrugs. 'She talked.'

'Oh.'

Maybe, just maybe, he'll understand. And if he could go that far into the abyss and come back, maybe he can show you the way out of the darkness.

'So, where do you get your scars?'

You open your mouth to tell about bloody spittle on golden hair and a split-second decision you still don't completely understand... and your voice won't come. You draw the knife from your side to cover your confusion, and you test the edge on your ring finger. Scarlet wells out at the slightest touch and you press your hand to Harry's mouth. 'From myself,' you say. 'For penance.'

Half an answer is better than none.

He kisses your fingers and folds your hand in his own. 'Blood won't wash away blood.'

'But it washes away the black.'

'No.' Harry shakes his head. 'No, it doesn't. But I know something that does.'

He still doesn't understand, doesn't see the abyss gaping under your feet, but he loves you. You love him. And you let him lead you from the library and to his bed.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

You have two months to decide, two months before the wedding. You spend half your nights with Harry and the other half down in the cellar, with _him_. _He_ can see your nervousness in the way you pace and clench your hands. He can hear it in the way your voice goes high and tight as you talk about inconsequential things. He can feel it in the way your hand wavers on the knife, as unsteady as in the beginning.

-In a way, I'm flattered I mean so much to you- he writes. -However, if I'd know this would be my reward, I would have actually tried to deserve it. I'm sure I could have found a way to increase your torment if I'd cared enough to bother.-

His smile could slice steel. It's a mask -- you can see the fear beneath the hatred, the terror of not knowing what comes next -- but the fear doesn't make his words less true.

_'Incendio.'_

The journal flames in his hands, and he casts it away before the fire can lick up his arms. He raises an eyebrow, but his hands are shaking and you watch with your own razor-edged smile.

You're falling into the abyss, but the thrill of dancing on the edge of disaster, courting final ruin, is addictive. This is how it used to be. The rush of hatred at his words spurs you through the days. The sight of his blood keeps you sane. How can you give this up? How can you cut out half of your heart?

'Mirror, mirror, in the dark, who's the closest to my heart?' you murmur that night as you stare at your reflection, weighing the shadows and light in your eyes. You can't have them both. Which will bind you closer to life: blood and darkness, fire and light? The mirror, long since charmed to silence, has no answer.

No one can help you make your choice.

You walked into the abyss on your own. If you walk out, you have to take every step yourself. Harry can hold your hand, but nobody can walk the path for you.

The way back from darkness is lined with knives. Every step opens a thousand aching wounds, and in time the light reveals all secrets, no matter how much you try to forget. The way into the abyss is easy and eventually painless; the dark hides all wounds and all prices. The dark hides everything, even itself.

'Mirror, mirror, in the light, which path should I take tonight?'

Red and green, light and dark, truth and lies, death and life.

Harry.

Lucius.

Choose.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

This is how it ends:

You pack your photographs and books, your kitchenware and clothes, your furniture and plants. You move everything into Grimmauld Place, which Harry never did get around to dividing into flats; it's easy enough to share with Remus and Tonks, and four people keep the worst of the gloom at bay. Then, one month before the wedding, you drag the bookcase away from the cellar door and ask Harry over to move your last boxes.

You stack everything in the front room, and then send him to the kitchen to remind Winky to lock up when you leave. He walks past the cellar door without noticing it the first time, but on his way back, his footsteps pause.

'Ginny?' he asks. 'Is this door new?'

'It goes to the cellar,' you call from the front room. You clasp your hands around the knife -- Harry won't let you use it, but you still carry it with you.

'You have a cellar?'

You don't answer.

'Ginny? Why did you block off the door? What's down there?' The door creaks as it swings open, and footsteps descend the stairs. 'Ginny, I'm going to-- Ginny!'

Light meets dark. The lies are exposed. Now Harry knows the worst thing you've ever done. Your life swings in the balance, waiting for his choice.

You hold the knife above your heart, ready to make one last cut.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

**End**

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

**AN:** Thanks for reading.

Please review -- I need feedback on this story more than on most others! As always, I'm most interested in knowing what parts of the story worked for you, what parts didn't, and _why_. Please don't review just to tell me I'm sick; I'm perfectly aware that "Knives" is a disturbing story. However, if you have specific reasons for your discomfort, then I'd be interested in hearing those so I have better guidelines for future stories.

Also, this is a ONE-SHOT. I'm aware that the ending is inconclusive, but I like it that way. There won't be any more chapters and there won't be a sequel. Period. I've already spent more time than I wanted on this particular scenario.

(**Note, 4/7/06:** People have griped about the ending anyway. Look, it's inconclusive for two reasons. The petty one is that I just like lady-or-the-tiger endings -- I fell in love with that story the first time I heard it, and have, to some degree, been chasing the ending ever since. Deal.

The more complex reason is that I _can't_ tell you what happens next, because it depends on what Harry decides. And what Harry decides is based on what you, the reader, think Ginny deserves. The story is in second person present tense because I wanted to be invasive. I wanted to say, "This is _you_ doing these things, right here, right now." So what do you think _you'd_ deserve if you did what Ginny does? If I continue the story -- if I tell you how _I_ think Harry reacts -- that doesn't tell you anything about yourself. It just tells you about me, and I'm already more than present enough in the story simply because I'm the writer.)

The Nietzsche quote at the beginning is from _Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future_. I'm not wild about either the Zimmern or the Kaufmann translations so you get my own variant: "He who fights with monsters should take care lest, in the process, he become a monster himself. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you." On one level, "Knives" was an attempt to see if I could embody that statement. There's a lot more going on in the story, of course -- a character study, a love story (or twisted love triangle, depending on your reading), thoughts about the traumatic effects of war, an attempt to capture the concrete-yet-dreamlike atmosphere of nightmares, etc. -- but Nietzsche is a very significant part of it.


End file.
